


Silence, Good Mother

by orphan_account



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Emotional Abuse, F/M, M/M, Motherhood, Romance, pretty damn canon except some implied Wolfstar and Hope living longer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 22:00:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14246640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Three women. One Pureblood, two Muggle. Two bad mothers, one good one. The thoughts of Walburga Black, Petunia Dursley, and Hope Lupin.





	Silence, Good Mother

**Author's Note:**

> Something I thought up this Mothers Day a couple of weeks back - I wanted to do a small character study of three mothers I found very interesting in the book series. I would have done Molly too, but she was done quite a few times, I'd thought. Do enjoy.

**_Walburga Black_ **

_“I will never have anything to do with you, or this house. This tomb, more like, and the pests that live in it!”_

_“Go then, I dare you, you swine, you blood traitor! Betray everything you had, you ungrateful boy, betray all the values which this family had –“_

_“This is no family, mother, this is a bloody cult!”_

I loved my firstborn, at the beginning. But Merlin, what an antsy baby he was. Sirius as a baby was fretful, angry – he seemed to have been rebellious from the moment he emerged, red face and squalling, from me. After forty hours, a painful and difficult birth, my throat was raw and bleeding and my husband had fallen asleep somewhere in this giant house. I would have fallen asleep too, there and then had they not handed him to me. Had they not put the most beautiful child that I had ever seen into my hands, screaming for England. But he quieted eventually, and his eyes were black, Black and shimmering with his first tears and I realized that he was the brightest star in this darkest of households. I loved him, at first. You must believe that.

He was always acting out. Spitting his food out, knocking heirlooms over, kicking Kreacher cruelly in the face. I’d punish him – what mother wouldn’t? I’d give him a walloping or threaten him with the cane, but I’d never used it on him. But I had wanted to, sometimes.

And then Regulus was born.

Not as strikingly beautiful as Sirius, but pale and large-eyed. Shy, sweet Regulus who would tail his brother like a lost dog, no matter how many times his father told him to stand on his own two feet. Regulus appropriately cried when he got chastised, only to run sobbing back to Sirius and ask for a game. One of his whooping, daredevil games where centuries of pureblood heritage were smashed down from mantelpieces. I’d almost had thought that his wicked ideas were sprouting in him, even then. Sirius began answering back, only for Regulus to copy him, thumb in his mouth (even at six, the boy was not weaned of that habit).

“You’ve a smewwy ay-nus,” Regulus used to copy as I refused Sirius dinner for one of his antics, causing the punished boy to snort. “You’re ugly!”

Then Sirius went off to Hogwarts – his father couldn’t even be bothered to take him so I did, grasping seven year old Regulus firmly by the hand. He had a wild look in him already, at eleven, grinning broadly to other young boys he had never met. He did not even look back at Regulus or I, as he threw his arm around a spectacled stranger and laughing, went into the carriage. I understand not looking at me. I have hit the boy, I have denied him food, I have made him clean, I have hated him more times than I have loved him. But his younger brother was wailing, struggling to join his brother onto the train, his breath hitching as he tried to follow, follow, always follow.

I didn’t let go. I’d lost one son to Gryffindor madness, I wouldn’t lose another – Regulus at least, was _mine._ I told him about the magnificence of our bloodline, made him memorize years upon years of family history. Told him how depraved it was to be Muggleborn, how there are some kinds of people, and those kinds were better than others. And by the time Regulus was in second year, the perfect Slytherin, Sirius was a pot waiting to boil over. Had he thought that by neglecting his brother (like I had neglected him after age eleven, perhaps), Regulus would follow in his devilish footsteps? And he looked me in the eye – his own mother – and spat that he found the idea of blood purity revolting. That he had was in love with a werewolf and had befriended Mudbloods, that he found our family enough to disgust him.

How could he find us so? The Muggles themselves, as harebrained as they are, have their own rudimentary purity ideology, although idiotically based on skin colour rather than blood. It was natural, I screeched back at him, and he did not look like my son at all – when he left. He was wild, and beautiful, high cheekbones and tossing black hair, but his eyes were now the darkest in the house. And I, stroking the trembling Regulus’ hair, I was _proud_ to have caused at least that darkness. But I loved him once, I tell you that. And when I loved him, it was not bitter, or sour, or depraved as he liked to call us later on – I loved that beautiful baby with the light eyes, but oh Merlin – am I proud to have put the bad seed in him. The rashness, the darkness, that would arise no matter how much he tried to be good and kind or true.

“Don’t worry, Reg,” I whispered to the boy, as I was stalking out of the room “and don’t turn out like _him_. You _know_ what will happen if you do.”

And Reg, biting his fingernail, followed.

 

 

**_Petunia Dursley_ **

_“But where is my mummy then? If Dudley has you and Piers has Aunty Jane and Gordon has Aunty Emma then what about me?”_

_“Stop asking questions, Harry.”_

_“But please, Aunt Petunia – where is my mummy gone?”_

_“Away. She was…in an explosion. A car explosion. It…crashed, and your mummy and daddy were gone.”_

Cuckoos are parasitic birds by nature. They would dump their egg in another bird’s nest, and when the cuckoo hatched, it would push all the other eggs out of the nest, or peck at the young birds’ food until they starved and died. Harry Potter was a cuckoo, a common bird, dropped on my doorstep ready to eat us out of house and home. An irritatingly happy baby, quiet whilst my Dudley screeched. He knew more words than Dudley, walked faster than Dudley, crawled first, got better marks, and called me “Mummy” before Dudley. I soon put that right. And I hated him for that. For being a better baby than my own baby.

I had wanted mediocrity, after years of living with that freak of nature, Lily, and for a short time I had had it. I married a mediocre man, who was middle class and not handsome, we lived in a house that looked like every other house, my son was blonde and large like any English baby. I never looked to improve myself, I was only quietly competitive – how could anyone have competed with Lily? The only thing that even brought a slight amount of strife to Vernon and my life was the mention of those Potters, and perhaps the fact that I once voted Labour unlike him, a staunch Tory. It was perfect normalcy, nothing more than ordinariness – just like I wanted.

And then that baby turned up.

I admit I had been stunned when I heard about what this baby had done. But later, many years later as the child began having nightmares about his parents dying, I pieced together that what made me almost drop the baby when I read the letter Dumbledore had sent was not the presence of the boy or whatever magic he had done but the fact that my sister was dead. My sister, whose mere presence caused me to be a second-class citizen in my own household. I began to do the same to him, I began to love my own boy even more, as if it would make up for refusing a six year old dinner and shoving him into a cupboard. I began thinking, feverishly, that the more I loved Dudley, the more it would make up for me hating that child. And its eyes.

He turned out to be a freak of nature too. I didn’t see him grow up. Frankly, I did not care. There was Dudley to look after, Dudley getting into trouble week after week for eating too much, or for bullying students. Once, Dudders was sent home from Smeltings for locking a Pakistani student in a cupboard, and making another boy with some form of autism get a haircut which Dudley administered, yanking the hair whilst trimming it with a blade. I shuddered as I looked at him sulking on the sofa that day – he was a bully, and he (oh, God, this frightened me) reminded me so much of that Potter boy. The older one – whom Lily would come home yearly till her seventh year, with tales of how he bullied other students merely for existing, or being different. I did not think, of course, how Dudley may have been familiar with the act of pulling someone’s long hair while cutting it, or with locking somebody in a cupboard.

But Dudley changed, and became ordinary after those _things_ attacked him when he was sixteen. I was at peace again, this blissful ordinariness was about to return – but apparently the same peace did not exist in _their_ world. So I had to leave, but at least I had my son, and my husband – and I could leave that boy behind. But that boy was now a man. I did not see it, although his home (well, was it not better than a Home?) was with me for seventeen years, but he had become a man. There was the shadow of stubble on his face and he was taller than I was, his arms wiry – and perhaps this was what surprised me as I left him, that his eyes were as green as Lily’s once was. Lively and adventurous, not a hint of ordinariness in them, the boy was apparently off to take on the world. His world. And as I left it, I remembered how much I had wanted it, that world. How much I had wanted to be un-ordinary, how I spent weeks writing that letter to Dumbledore. And how much I had loved Lily.

**_Hope Lupin_ **

_"I don't know why you tried so hard to keep me alive, mum. I'd rather have died. I'd rather have died a thousand times over than live like this."_

_"Remus, you're breaking my heart."_

_"Better to have lost a son at four than to drag him across life like a millstone round the world's neck!"_

I don’t know much about magic and all, I can tell you that. Don’t even know much about nothing non magical either, really. Pa was a miner, ma died young, I’d grown up the prettiest girl in the mountains and Cardiff’s the farthest I’d ever been from home. And then there was this walk in a wood, and a violent man, and this funny shy stranger with brown hair who just banished him with a wave of a stick. And I fell in love with him, and we had a little house outside Swansea and that’s all there is to it, really. I’d never been outside Wales, but Lyall – he’d been all over the world, to India, to Egypt, to America. It frightened me and thrilled me, his life and his world. He would tell me stories of ghosts and monsters, but he would also laugh and spin his wand, and turn my frock into a ballgown as we danced in our little house.

And my boy was a good boy. I didn’t understand what bit him, at least not until he began screaming behind a bolted room as Lyall tried his damndest not to cry. I still didn’t understand too much, except my baby boy was sick and for that I didn’t mind moving from Wales. I didn’t mind moving to all corners of Britain as Lyall grew thin with looking for a cure, as Remus drew further and further within himself. Magic or not, a mother with a sick child knows exactly what to do and Remus, bless him, had perfect manners and was incredibly kind to the very few children we met. And then that man came, Dumbledore, with the beard that needed a trim.

It’s funny, on hindsight. We tried to put up a sofa against the door but he pressed up against the window. Lyall immediately put up newspaper on the glass as though he’d forgotten his wand existed, but Dumbledore yelled “hello, is anyone home?” through the chimney, before sliding down it, soot in his beard. Remus thought it was the biggest joke in the world, laughing fit to burst – but it was nowhere as near as happy as he looked when he heard he got into Hogwarts, that he could go. I didn’t really understand that glee. Maybe, for me, it’s like being told you’d never be able to walk, and then suddenly getting up and realizing you could run.

He only got happier and happier, Remus did. His friends, three other boys, wrecked our house almost yearly, but I loved them like my sons. And when I knew that he was in love with one of the boys, that roguish dark-haired, wild one – I have never felt prouder. He was happy. It was all I ever wanted for Remus; not ever since I heard his first scream as that monster bit him, but ever since I heard his first scream as he slid out of me into the midwife’s hands. But it all came crashing down, and my boy came back – his lover a criminal, his friends dust on the earth, and he was begging me, on his knees, to die. I have never suffered more, as a mother. Perhaps only when he left the day after, with a note telling me he loved me, and that he was leaving to travel – only then must I have suffered more.

I kept myself busy, I did. Lyall was no more and Remus was grieving, travelling the country. I went back to Wales then, they were turbulent times there, the miners were on strike and I dove into the movement, I ran soup kitchens and heard stories about sons who were too sick to work. I wondered where mine was, and I kept wondering for years and years until he turned up on my doorstep, fifteen years older and smiling, crow’s feet lining his eyes (he looked far too much like Lyall after sadness touched his life) with a pretty young girl with blue hair and a soup tureen which she immediately dropped on the doorstep.

Mary, I prayed as I let them in wordlessly, let him be happy, now at least.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it - tried to keep it as canon as possible, minus some implied Wolfstar and hope not dying before Remus turned twenty. Do leave your thoughts xx


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